The Microscopic World In Motion

I spent my postdoc years in a bioimaging center (though it was a long time ago, I’m still pretty psyched to see that they’re still using my gif logo design for the facility). This was at the dawn of a revolution in cellular and developmental biology: the adoption of using fluorescent proteins for imaging, which allowed you to view cells and structures in living organisms over time, rather than looking at static tissue sections.

My former mentor always described it as the difference between looking at a single still photograph of action during a football game, or watching the entire game. If you saw this image below, what could you learn from it about the rules of the game?

That’s essentially the way biological imaging worked for centuries, trying to infer complex processes from a single frozen moment. But now we can get cells, and even entire organisms to make their own fluorescent labels and we can watch things develop over time. In my lab days, these were still fairly crude tools, and I am constantly amazed at the progress that has been made since then.

David Crotty

David Crotty is the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He serves on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

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